Alan Bristow by Alan Bristow
Author:Alan Bristow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Aviation
ISBN: 9781844688180
Publisher: Pen & Sword
Published: 2010-03-10T05:00:00+00:00
CHAPTER 16
World Expansion
In the 1950s the aviation industry in Britain had begun to coalesce into two camps – the government-supported publicly subsidised airlines BEA and BOAC, and the independent operators who increasingly found that amalgamation was the only way they could compete with the state. Over the years, Airwork joined together with Transair, Aviation Traders, Morton Air Services, Air Charter, and Channel Air Bridge before the merger with Hunting-Clan Air Transport in 1960, which resulted in the formation of British United Airways. Under the umbrella of Air Holdings Ltd, BUA continued to take over smaller independents like Silver City Airways and British Aviation Services, and by the mid-1960s it was the biggest independent airline in Britain.
Hunting-Clan had been owned by British and Commonwealth Shipping Ltd, whose chairman Sir Nicholas Cayzer later became chairman of Air Holdings Ltd. In the meantime, Sir Myles Wyatt, who’d been managing director of Airwork, took on the same role at Air Holdings, while Freddie Laker, who had started Channel Air Bridge, became managing director of British United Airways. Bristow Helicopters Ltd always seemed a fairly loose fit in the Air Holdings organisation, but unlike many of the other component companies it made good money, and both Myles Wyatt and Nick Cayzer had a lot of time for companies that made money. They didn’t understand the helicopter business and showed no inclination to learn about it, so I was largely left alone to run my own race.
The Persian Gulf, Bolivia and the Caribbean were producing good profits for Bristow Helicopters Ltd, but oil exploration was expanding all over the world and I made it my business to know exactly where the company might be needed in years to come. I had a network of contacts that grew over the years in number and seniority. I knew Sheikhs and their extended families, Presidents and Prime Ministers and those who were jockeying to replace them, the senior civil servants in whom the real power is invested, and even those who might conceivably be helpful one day; I had a book full of names and I never threw away a phone number. Most of all I made friends with oil company executives, the men who knew what would be happening two to five years down the line because they would be making it happen. Many of them were Americans, and most were of a type – outdoors men who enjoyed what they call ‘hunting’ and what we know as shooting. I developed my estate at Baynards Park into one of the best pheasant, partridge and duck shoots in England, and to it came Sheikh Zayed and senior figures in the oil industry from around the world.
Information helpful to Bristow Helicopters Ltd came from all sorts of sources, some obvious, some less so. I read the oil industry press avidly. Oil companies who were embarking on new exploration projects publicised it through press releases to oil industry magazines and wrote stories about it in their house journals. These announcements would
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